Organic production, sustainable farming methods, and agroecological practices.
Under the straw burning ban, Dongting Lake area farmers in Hunan are forced to incorporate straw. Oilseed rape costs 60–70 yuan extra per season, yields nearly halve, and rice stem borer and other pests worsen year on year; one large-scale grower simply abandoned over 200 mu.
In Penang’s Batu Maung, durian tours take tourists seeking old-tree kampung flavours, while an exceptionally abundant harvest has also left orchard owners facing a price crash and a dispute over tree-ripened durian.
A bachelor’s graduate spends a month on an ecological agriculture internship at Baicaoyuan in Guigang, Guangxi — hoeing, carrying water, weathering a violent downpour — then leaves, unable to bear the heat, admitting they can never do without air conditioning.
Five years ago, Kouzi broke raw ground from scratch and hand-built a self-sufficient one-person farm; her health indicators are now better than they were twenty years ago. This past year, she has still been fighting a lawsuit over fabrications generated by Baidu AI.
From a Beijing office to a Dong village in Qiandongnan, Chen Xi spent seven years building a timber house, growing nine varieties of rice reliably, and using the proceeds from 5,000 jin of purple rice to build the village’s first library for the children.
Dutch grower Metske went from the squatting movement and a vegetarian restaurant to a 6½-acre organic vegetable farm at Bore Place, Kent. He now sells lettuce and tomatoes at the Growing Communities market in north London, running the farm on contacts and sales channels – no subsidies.
No pesticides, no regard for yield: from their own bayberry trees to industrialised variety breeding, a southern farmer argues that store-bought fruit grows sweeter, bigger, and hardier in storage and transit, yet its nutrients decline — and every purchase votes for capital’s choices.
Xianzi, a postgraduate at China Agricultural University’s Science and Technology Backyard in Quzhou, partnered with neighbour Uncle to open an organic fertiliser plant, hoping to reconnect the broken crop-and-livestock cycle. What blocks the way: raw-material transport costs, site rent and sums grain farmers simply cannot make work.
Under the 2016 straw-burning ban, village cadres hired guards and satellite-detected fires meant docked pay; ten years on, Heilongjiang farmers waited for a weather-forecasted “burning window” – simply because one pass of the deep plough for residue incorporation scrambles every plot boundary marked by ridges.
Farmers in K Village, northeastern Thailand, have self-bred more than 250 local rice varieties and sell organic rice direct via e-commerce. With their rice cooperative incubated by the village credit cooperative, they need no subsidies even as prices fell 30 per cent.
